Quote:
Originally Posted by polak
The thing is, an iPhone can't kill anybody.
There will be a lot more roadblocks before self-driving cars are widespread. Think about liability for accidents. Will it be up to the manufacturer to cover accident costs? The owner of the car, who technically didn't do anything wrong? Some sort of pool we all pay into? How much is this pool going to cost for the first adapters?
Then you can guarantee that when the inevitable moment comes and something malfunctions and people die, you will have a complete re-evaluation of the system.
I used to doubt the technology too, but since the last debate on here, I was convinced otherwise and now believe the technology will be there sooner rather than later, but I think the legislation and confidence will be lacking for quite some time.
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1.2 million+ people are currently dying on the roads every year. 90+% are driver error and 30% of those die in accidents related to drunk driving. Right there you've just saved 360,000 lives per year by getting drunk drivers off the road. But for some reason you're caught up in the 1 person who might die because of a computer error, talk about being unable to see the forest through the trees.
Once the technology matures more automated vehicles are going to reduce accident rates by orders of magnitudes, nearly eliminate fatalities and increase the efficiency of our road systems.
Anyways, both Google and Mercendes expect to be commercially producing autonomous capable vehicles by 2020 and there may be some on the road as soon as 2017.
Further the google cars autonomously driven over 1.1 million kms and the only accident thus far while operating under autonomous conditions was being read ended by a human driver while stopped at a light. I would wager there are quite a few drivers on this forum who cannot boast such a record.